Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley (review)

In reading Paige McGinley’s book I expected that I would be exposed to new theoretical perspectives regarding the mass-mediation of the blues and blues culture. However, I never anticipated that it would draw me into deeper interrogations of the historiography of the blues, the attributes of blues performance, monikers of authenticity in blues culture, and issues of economic/cultural exploitation that are related to the blues tourism industry. The foundation of McGinley’s study is the negation of the links between black and white theatrical traditions and the performance of the blues. In this text the word performance takes on many different contexts and raises questions regarding agency over who or what defines the act of performance on and off stage. She reveals the multilayered and complicated contexts of “performance” that envelop the blues that extend beyond sonic representations and have come to include the engagement of the body on the stage, images captured on film and through television, and the constructed “lived” blues experience.

Those expecting McGinley to focus her thesis around the usual cast of characters invoked in blues historiography (e.g. Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters) will be surprised to discover that the narrative is centered around a collective of artists that includes some contemporary regional artists active in the Mississippi Delta region as well as Ma Rainey, Huddie Ledbetter, Bessie Smith, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Brownie Mc-Ghee. Through analysis of the different praxis advanced individually and collectively by these artists, the author addresses how the intersection of the blues with mainstream popular culture mediums and a growing fascination with blackness reflected a strong link between the genre and American theatrical traditions that were first explored through the minstrel stage and later through vaudeville and other forms of public entertainment. There are three main theoretical perspectives that frame this discussion: 1) the gendering of the blues and blues performance practice through the rejection of its theatrical roots; 2) cross-examination of the attributes of authenticity in blues performance; and 3) the construction of cultural and racial narratives of “invisibility” that result from the com-modification of blues culture.

The first chapter provides the reader with an early genealogical study of the confluence of the blues with black theater practices. While McGinley’s work explores some common readings on the genesis of the vaudeville blues, she extends beyond these to include analysis of the debates regarding the politics of respectability in the Post-Reconstruction black community regarding the advancement of the blues, black women performers, and the tent show. One of the key and interesting aspects of this chapter, which transitions this work away from similar discussions, is its analysis of the social and political uses of costuming and photography. The author’s readings of iconic photographs of Smith and Rainey provide the reader with details regarding the authority these women exercised over their public personas and how these images reflected deeper intellectual considerations about representations of femininity and blackness in Post–World War I America. This question of agency over the blues persona is the point of transition into an intriguing discussion of Huddie Ledbetter, which attempts to free him from the narrative of passivity to one of conscious agency in relation to his role in the urban folk movement and his interactions with the Lomaxes. McGinley deconstructs the making of the stage and musical persona of Leadbelly and establishes Ledbetter was a separate identity from this mediated persona. However, one of the intriguing points discussed in this chapter was the theoretical relationship between the anthropological work of Zora Neal Hurston and that of Alan and John Lomax. The author explores effectively the contradictory nature of Lomax’s anti-theatrical beliefs and his use of the lecture-performance during the 1930s and 1940s.

The last two chapters of the book contextualize the globalization of blues culture as well as the construction of a blues milieu through television and the blues tourism industry. In this aspect...